Your Life Torn Open, essay 1: Sharing is a trap

This article was taken from the March 2011 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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The author of The Cult Of The Amateurargues that if we lose our privacy we sacrifice a
fundamental part of our humanity.

Every so often, when I'm in Amsterdam, I visit the Rijksmuseum
to remind myself about the history of privacy. I go there to gaze
at a picture called The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,
which was painted by Jan Vermeer in 1663. It is of an unidentified
Dutch woman avidly reading a letter. Vermeer's picture, to borrow a
phrase from privacy advocates Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, is
a celebration of the "sacred precincts of private and domestic
life". It's as if the artist had kept his distance in order to
capture the young woman, cocooned in her private world, at her
least socially visible.

Today, as social media
continues radically to transform how we communicate and interact, I
can't help thinking with a heavy heart about The Woman in
Blue. You see, in the networking age of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, the social invisibility
that Vermeer so memorably captured is, to excuse the pun,
disappearing. That's because, as every Silicon Valley notable, from Eric Schmidt to Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly
acknowledged, privacy is dead: a casualty of the cult of the
social. Everything and everyone on the internet is becoming
collaborative. The future is, in a word, social.

On this future network, we will all know what everyone is doing
all the time. It will be the central intelligence agency for 21st
century life. As Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams argue in their
2010 book Macrowikinomics, today's "age of network
intelligence" represents a "turning point in history" equivalent to
the Renaissance. They are, in a sense, right. On today's internet
everything we do -- from our use of ecommerce, location services
and email to online search, advertising and entertainment -- is
increasingly open and transparent. And it is this increasingly
ubiquitous social network -- fuelled by our billions of
confessional tweets and narcissistic updates -- that is invading
the "sacred precincts" of private and domestic life.

Every so often, when I'm in London, I visit University College
to remind myself about the future of privacy. I go there to visit
the tomb of the utilitarian social reformer Jeremy Bentham, a
glass-and-wood mausoleum he dubbed his "AutoIcon", from which the
philosopher's waxy corpse has been watching over us for the last
150 years. It was Bentham, you see, who, in 1787, at the dawn of
the industrial age, designed what he called a "simple idea in
architecture" to improve the management of social institutions,
from prisons and asylums to workhouses and schools. Bentham
imagined a physical network of small rooms in which we would be
inspected "every instant of time". He named a tract after his idea,
calling it, without irony, Panopticon; or, the Inspection
House. Bentham's goal was the elimination of mystery and
privacy. Everything, for this utilitarian inventor of the
greatest-happiness principle, would become shared and thus social.
In Bentham's perfectly efficient and transparent world, there would
be nowhere for anyone to hide.

Unfortunately, Bentham's panopticon was a dark premonition. The
mass mechanical age of the telegraph, the factory and the
motion-picture camera created the
physical architecture to transform everyone into exhibits -- always
observable by our Big Brothers in government, commerce and media.
In the industrial age, factories, schools, prisons and, most
ominously, entire political systems were built upon this technology
of collective surveillance. The last 200 years have indeed been the
age of the great exhibition.

Yet nobody in the industrial era actually wanted to become
artefacts in this collective exhibition. The great critics of mass
society -- from John Stuart Mill, Warren and Brandeis to George
Orwell, Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault -- tried to shield
individual privacy from the panopticon's always-on gaze. As
Foucault warned, "visibility is a trap." So, from Mill's solitary
free thinker in On Liberty to Josef K in The
Trial and Winston Smith in 1984, the hero of the mass
industrial age is the individual who takes pleasure in his own
invisibility, who turns his back on the camera, who -- in the
timeless defence of privacy from Warren and Brandeis -- just wants
to be "let alone".

Yet now, at the dusk of the industrial and the dawn of the
digital age, Bentham's simple idea of architecture has returned. But
history never repeats itself, not identically, at least. Today, as
the internet evolves from a platform for data into a space for
people, the panopticon has reappeared with a chilling twist. What
we once saw as a prison is now considered a playground; what was
considered pain is today viewed as pleasure. The age of the great
exhibition is being replaced by the age of great exhibitionism.

Today's "simple architecture" is the internet, that
ever-expanding network of networks combining the global web of
personal computers, the wireless world of handheld devices and
other "smart" social products such as connected televisions and gaming consoles, in which around a quarter
of the Earth's population has already taken up residency. With its
two billion digitally connected souls and five billion connected
devices, the network can house an infinite number of rooms. This is
a global building that, more than two centuries after Bentham
sketched his design, allows us to be inspected every instant.

This digital world -- described by New York University's Clay
Shirky as the "connective tissue of society" and by US secretary of
state Hillary Clinton as the new "nervous system of the planet" --
has been designed to keep us forever on show in our networked
crystalline palaces. And today, in an age of transparent online
communities such as Twitter, LinkedIn
and Facebook, the social has become,
in Shirky's words, the "default setting" on the internet, thereby
transforming digital technology from a tool of our "second lives"
into a central part of real life.

But this real life could have been choreographed by Bentham. As
Shirky notes, popular geolocation
services such as Foursquare, Gowalla,
Google Latitude and Facebook Places,
which enable us to "effectively see through walls" and know the
exact location of all our friends, are making society more
"legible" and allowing us to be read "like a book". No wonder,
then, that Jeff Jarvis, one of the leading apostles of what he
calls "publicness", promises that social media will make us all
immortal.

Comments

The problem with this article is that the starting point is the technology itself. I know this is a cliché but the internet is simple a tool. The problem does not lie with the technology but with the 'real' society.Taking a pop at big business is becoming tiresome and a lazy way of scapegoating. Before the proliferation of 'social' networks the store card kept an eye on what we were buying (and still does). Business needs to know its customers and the storing of personal details (and what you buy, is a personal detail) allows them to do what they have always done, but more effectively.The article is right to point out the blasé approach that people have towards putting personal details online. But it is what they choose to do.The reality is that Facebook and Twitter are not really 'social' networks. It would be more in line with things to view them as 'anti-social' networks. They allow for an escape from the perceived dangers of interacting with real people and provide a safe environment for individuals to put themselves across to total strangers. The (anti) social networker chooses what information to provide and does so safe in the knowledge that any judgement on them can be easily dismissed by the lack of physical space and also by whining to a moderator.In the real world- particularly the developed world- especially over the past two decades, the social groups such as political parties and trade unions, have ceased to function as representative bodies. Democracy is commonly seen as a joke as unelected bureaucrats from state appointed bodies, make all the decisions. The cult of the NGO, particularly the celebrity-led NGOs, override democratic institutions, in their quest to enforce their outlook, without concern for the outcomes and without any social base.Britain is as close to a police state as any developed nation is at present. The constant demand for us to identify ourselves in order for us to justify what we do is now so entrenched within British society. The population is one of the most surveillanced of any. CCTV cameras are everywhere. Laws dictating where we can smoke, for instance, invade both public and private space. It is common for people over the age of 21 to be asked for ID in order to purchase alcohol (even though the legal age is 18). The scourge of 'multiculturalism' plays its part as well. People tend to see themselves as belonging to some demographic group before they see themselves as members of Humanity.The predominance of lifestyle politics in western nations speaks to the exhaustion of old 'tribal' groupings. There is also the predominance of the 'politics of fear', which constantly tell us that the world out there is not a safe place to be. Terrorist stories, child abuse stories, etc. all serve to reinforce a constant feeling of insecurity as we are all potential victims.All this is now ingrained within society. Is it any wonder that people find solace in these networking sites?And yet even here we see the creeping hand of the fear-monger. Is nothing safe?There is nothing actually wrong with networking sites. There is nothing wrong with individuals creating their own blogs and blowing their own trumpet; I would say that in this the internet has extended our liberty and created an arena for talented people, as well as the misguided, that has a wider audienece.The fatalistic approach of this article, overlooks the fact that people do interact and take action to change things in the real world. One need only consider the event in North Africa and the Middle East. However much the western establishments want to portray these uprisings as the result of WikiLeaks and social networking site, it is real fists, bullets, thinking and energy that will be the deciding factor .When I open my e-mail and see that I have a message from someone that I want to hear from, the sensation of that cannot replace the real joy of opening my front door and saying 'good morning' to the grumpy neighbour who is returning from the newsagent.

Denis Joe

Feb 18th 2011

How about web cams in all public school classrooms as a way to legally document and enforce minimal standards of student behavior and teacher competence? No doubt the ACLU and the unions would object on the grounds of privacy. But what about the right to a good free public education for students who live in low-income areas?

Luke Lea

Feb 18th 2011

Privacy is important, but it can also be a trap. Privacy can be very isolating. We can come to believe that we are terminally unique, that ordinary details of our lives and our bodies are fundamentally embarassing, when in fact they are normal. When we share, we come to see that we are not unique, that there are lots of people just like us, that our concerns are shared by others. We communicate. We allow ourselves to be changed. We allow others to hear us. We join the human race.

Anne B

Feb 18th 2011

In reply to Anne B

brilliant - I think there is room for both sharing and privacy, non?

LEORA TURKO

Nov 3rd 2011

Really Anne B? We join the human race when others hear us? Do you realise that you have just wiped most of the world out of the human race? The people who use social media are primarily middle-class and live in first-world countries. There are billions of people who don't even have access to a computer, let alone know how to use social media.In the future we will not know what everyone is doing, all the time. We'll know what a select group of mostly white people are doing. I work with people who are on the fringes of society due to homelessness, drug abuse issues, mental health issues and poverty. I probably see about 500 people a year and I've been in this job for five years. My clients' ages range from teens to 60s and 70s. Virtually none of my clients has access to a computer. Most of them, even those young enough to have used them at school, don't know how to use a computer. They don't even have an email address, let alone a Facebook page. And it's possible that a lot of them - especially those with mental health issues - never will. And I live in a rich country. Imagine, then, rural India or Africa, villages which don't even have access to electricity, let alone computers.The lives of whole swathes of peoples go unrecorded. The poor and dispossessed have often disappeared from history, so I guess our time is no different. However the lives of the poor and dispossessed were often chronicled by those who had an interest in doing so and were educated enough to put things on record - novelists, diarists, philosophers, historians, priests. It may be that with our navel-gazing tendencies, our minute chronicling of our tedious little lives, that we will no longer turn our gaze on others and chronicle their lives. On the other hand, I believe that from the time we started using film and video to record events and faxes and emails to send correspondence, we doomed our time to being the worst recorded time in modern history. Pretty much everything we use to record our lives and events is ephemeral. It is unlikely much of it will last for very long. It may well be that this time that seems so over-recorded, that should be a treasure chest for historians in the future, will be a time with virtually no records left. And the records that are left will be those that have been chosen by who knows who to be saved in new technologies. Even now we can see history being destroyed with film studios throwing out film they no longer wish to keep. Some is put on digital. Some is simply thrown out because it's believed to have no value.As for your statement Anne B - which I find pathetic I'd have to say - I am possibly barely of the human race. I have no facebook page. I use no social media, except obviously utilising comments pages like this. I do not fanatically stay in touch with my friends. And I am perfectly happy and hardly arrogant enough to think that I am unique. I don't need social media to tell me that there are lots of people like me - I only need to walk down the street every day. I only need to listen to people on the train. I only need to read. My privacy is very important to me. I only share what I want to share. I also don't have a TV. If the future of marketing and data collection is in social networking I am a marketeer's nightmare - especially given that I have a reasonable disposable income!

vj

Feb 19th 2011

Marketing + insecurity = social media.

Peter

Feb 19th 2011

Marketing + insecurity = social media.

Peter

Feb 19th 2011

This article is very poorly written. It suffers from Quote Great People From The Past Syndrome. No matter how much good arguments there have been for privacy (Orwell, Fouceault,Vermeer, whatever...) there have also been many great arguments for being social. To think of one example: "No Man Is an Island" said John Donne. Does the reader of this article get to know any argument as to WHY the next age of connectedness is to be a dark age? Are we informed what aspects of privacy are worth protecting and what aspects of isolation are worth giving up? Is this a well balanced argument about us going in the wrong direction? Or is this just summing up some cliche feelings about privacy and Decorating The Argument With Dead Philosophers? Preaching doom about privacy happens to sell really well in online magazines like "Wired".But I'd like to see some real arguments, pro or anti privacy.

Jan

Feb 19th 2011

Actually - biologically humans are social animals.Alienation and isolation are destructive places for a human being.Solitude is a good thing at times, especially for artists.Any network that can provide a sense of community is a good thing.By the way, a visit to the Rijksmuseum requires much social interaction among hoards of tourists. A seventeenth century painter living in the midst of plague, war, and poverty would happily trade places with someone owning an iphone today.

Erin McAfee

Feb 19th 2011

Actually - biologically humans are social animals.Alienation and isolation are destructive places for a human being.Solitude is a good thing at times, especially for artists.Any network that can provide a sense of community is a good thing.By the way, a visit to the Rijksmuseum requires much social interaction among hoards of tourists. A seventeenth century painter living in the midst of plague, war, and poverty would happily trade places with someone owning an iphone today.

Erin McAfee

Feb 19th 2011

Actually - biologically humans are social animals.Alienation and isolation are destructive places for a human being.Solitude is a good thing at times, especially for artists.Any network that can provide a sense of community is a good thing.By the way, a visit to the Rijksmuseum requires much social interaction among hoards of tourists. A seventeenth century painter living in the midst of plague, war, and poverty would happily trade places with someone owning an iphone today.

Erin McAfee

Feb 19th 2011

In reply to Erin McAfee

The human understanding of the term "social" is poor and overstated compared to those of other biologically, social beings like ants, dolphins or even orcas. These beings basically evolved PROPER VALUES and learn to be socially successful whereas us humans basically evolved IMPROPER VALUES and learn to be socially unsuccessful [and destructive].

Tabris

Feb 2nd 2012

I do believe that sharing can be trap, it is hard to trust anything

christina vang

Feb 20th 2011

I do believe that sharing is a trap, it is quite to trust anything,

christina vang

Feb 20th 2011

I personally found it funny to see a facebook widget left from the article.The problem with citing Foucault, Orwell etc. in this context is that those people were fighting the vision of a totalitarian state. But there is no global totalitarian state governing the Internet. The Internet is driven by hedonist capitalism which is much more difficult to grasp. And no, it doesn't make it any better.

tom

Feb 20th 2011

In reply to tom

right on, tom. this hedonist capitalism that drives the internet is mind-bending; do you have any books or essays that do a decent job of looking at the new forms/tactics of capitalism that have been created alongside the internet? thanks!!

joseph

Oct 15th 2011

Worse than seemingly losing our privacy would be losing the fundamental right to freely express ourselves, in whatever new forms of communication humanity may bring about. Also, that sacred "privacy" that the author, Andrew Kleen, says can be found in reflecting on Veneer's "Woman in Blue Reading a Letter", and which he claims is now being sacrificed as our lives are being torn open by social media, is not so cut (, paste,) and dried (shared). The new info digital epoch upon us, like the industrial revolution and the onset of the age of reason before it, also brings along with it a change in consciousness, and within both this collective and individual's evolution, comes other ways of experiencing the different "fundamental part(s) of our humanity". Evolution takes place at every level of human experience, and, as such, language and words take on new connotations. For instance, the words "Friend" and "Share" have taken on altogether different meanings now than they had 10 years ago before the electronic social networks' explosion. Yet, within Kleen's so-called "tearing open", there also has been a much deeper, reflective, delving inward that we are beginning to sense throughout all experience, and which is no longer limited to only the "private". Nonetheless, the "private" of the past still exists today, the only difference is that we have more access to it now, and so in this way we experience the "private" differently now, and hence also express it differently. I suggest Kleen awakens to the higher potential here and in the NOW, rather than romanticising about a past that can never be here or trying to evoke a foreboding of some innevitably "shared" future. Whatever is in store for us, the reality is and always shall be only in the mind that creates it. And until we evolve into one omnipotent, all-seeing collective consciousness, each and every individual mind needs to be shared.

Lewis

Feb 22nd 2011

The Panopticon example is a little misplaced. The role of the Panopticon was not that you WOULD be viewed all the time but that you COULD at any time be viewed - the idea then was that people automatically modified their own behaviour due to the omnipresence of the possibility of being viewed.